Quote of the Day

“No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows”.

• J. Robert Oppenheimer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Field – Nocturne No. 5 in B flat major

Link

According to Nate Silver Biden is on course to win on November 3

I’ve just been looking at his latest projection.

I can’t help remembering that at this time in 2016 he was convinced that Hilary Clinton would win!

How to (Actually) Save Time When You’re Working Remotely

From the Harvard Business Review:

While the widespread shift to remote work hasn’t been without its challenges, it does offer a major silver lining: For many of us, commuting has become a thing of the past. In the United States alone, eliminating the daily commute has saved workers around 89 million hours each week — equivalent to time savings of more than 44.5 million full workdays since the pandemic began! These numbers suggest that working remotely could be a deus ex machina for reclaiming one of our most precious and limited resources: time.

But despite the potential for staggering time savings, many have struggled to achieve everything they hoped the pandemic would finally make time for: baking sourdough, meditating, or writing the next great literary masterpiece. On the contrary, data we collected from 12,000 people across the U.S. and Europe during the pandemic show that the additional time is often burned on unproductive work and unsatisfying leisure activities. Having more time does not necessarily mean that we use it wisely. So, what are we doing wrong?

Answers on a stamped, addressed, handmade postcard.

HT to Charles Arthur, who spotted it.

Stop Expecting Life to Go Back to Normal Next Year

Well, actually, I wasn’t expecting that. But it’s the headline on a NYT OpEd today:

Anthony Fauci warned us last week that Covid-19 is likely to be hanging over our lives well into 2021. He’s right, of course. We need to accept this reality and take steps to meet it rather than deny his message.

Many Americans are resistant to this possibility. They’re hoping to restart postponed sports seasons, attend schools more easily, enjoy rescheduled vacations and participate in delayed parties and gatherings.

It is completely understandable that many are tiring of restrictions due to Covid-19. Unfortunately, their resolve is weakening right when we need it to harden. This could cost us dearly.

The unrealistic optimism stems in part from the fact that people have started pinning their hopes on a medical breakthrough. There have been promising developments. Remdesivir holds potential for those who are hospitalized. Convalescent plasma might do the same. Antibody treatments might improve outcomes for some or prevent infections in those at highest risk…

It’s an interesting and not very cheery assessment.

The bottom line is that we’re in a marathon when too many people think it’s a sprint.

Nicci Gerrard’s crowdfunding campaign is half-way to meeting its target!

Please consider donating. It’s a great cause.

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Quote of the Day

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”.

• George Orwell, 1945.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Glenn Gould plays Haydn Piano Sonata no.60 in C major (13 minutes)

Link

It will take more than attacks on Huawei to win the tech cold war

My Observer column this morning. Banning the Chinese giant from using US components won’t stop a company that’s too big for China to allow it to fail.

Nobody knows how this attempt to strangle Huawei will pan out. The company is too big and too dominant in China to fail – and it’s unlikely the Chinese state would let it go down anyway. After all, Huawei still has a huge domestic market and non-aligned countries will still buy its mobile networking gear. But if one of the motives behind the American assault was to reduce the chances that China would replace the US as the global tech hegemon then it’s unlikely to work.

All that’s happened is that the campaign has highlighted the extent to which semiconductor design and manufacturing capacity have become key strategic assets. The Chinese understand this and there’s no reason that they can’t build that strategic capacity: all it needs is money and brains and they have plenty of both. And when they finally achieve tech parity, the US – and hopefully the rest of the world – will have learned a new slogan: the technological is not just political, it’s geopolitical.

Trevor Paglen has a fascinating, sobering new exhibition on the history of photography and its relationship to state surveillance.

His work brilliantly illustrates how artists can sometimes critique tech much more effectively — and efficiently — than we academics. He was the guy behind ImageNetRoulette, for example, a digital art project and viral selfie app that exposed how biases are intrinsic in facial-recognition technology. Here’s how the NYT reported in 2019.

When Tabong Kima checked his Twitter feed early Wednesday morning, the hashtag of the moment was #ImageNetRoulette.

Everyone, it seemed, was uploading selfies to a website where some sort of artificial intelligence analyzed each face and described what it saw. The site, ImageNet Roulette, pegged one man as an “orphan.” Another was a “nonsmoker.” A third, wearing glasses, was a “swot, grind, nerd, wonk, dweeb.”

Across Mr. Kima’s Twitter feed, these labels — some accurate, some strange, some wildly off base — were played for laughs. So he joined in. But Mr. Kima, a 24-year-old African-American, did not like what he saw. When he uploaded his own smiling photo, the site tagged him as a “wrongdoer” and an “offender.”

“I might have a bad sense of humor,” he tweeted, “but I don’t think this is particularly funny.”

As it turned out, his response was just what the site was aiming for.

An immodest proposal

Nice essay by Samuel Weber, meditating on the ageism intrinsic in mask refusal.

He starts by reminding us of Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” for alleviating the shortage of food facing the growing Irish population. The essay, published in 1729, suggested that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food to rich people. This satirical hyperbole mocked heartless attitudes towards the poor, as well as British policy toward the Irish in general.

Samuel Weber has used this satirical lens as a way of thinking about contemporary attitudes towards the pandemic. The virus, he writes,

has one distinctive quality that might have appealed to Swift’s satiric talent: in attacking above all the poor and the elderly, it can be seen to be a kind of Malthusian force striving to rid “society” of its unproductive elements. This is especially relevant to the elderly persons “parked” in “nursing” or “old-age homes.” In French there is a good word that describes the reality of many of these institutions, even if it does so brutally: mouroir. It is a place people are sent to die, when there is no one willing or able to care for them in a less institutional manner. The spread of dementia, in its various forms, collected often under the name “Alzheimer,” has only increased this tendency of contemporary societies to dispose of the elderly by removing them to invisible institutional settings, more or less well-equipped depending on the financial resources of those subjected to them.

If he’d been around today, Weber writes, Swift would have had to modify his satirical proposal.

No one is proposing to eat the poor and the elderly. It is enough to dispose of them, just as society has tried to exclude them from public view by parking them in “homes” or in segregated housing “projects” where they are free to assassinate each other in a scramble for the profits of a socially imposed “drug trade.”

Not cannibalism today — that would be too crude. Today’s “immodest proposal” is being made practically if implicitly by all those who have decided that the extra effort involved in wearing masks, distancing, etc., is simply not worth it, since it only affects “others” and not oneself. This attitude and behavior should not surprise anyone, since it simply builds on the invisibility that is already a characteristic of most of the societies affected by this pandemic. Such invisibility — which sustains thoughtlessness and unconcern about structural injustice — has long been a “preexisting condition” of these societies. COVID-19 has only cast a fresh and harsh light on this — but it is a light that conceals more than it reveals.

I love these sharp perspectives on current events. Swift’s modest proposal also made a lot of people think — though perhaps not the right people.

Haven’t we come far

No comment needed.

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Quote of the Day

“Don’t wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”

• Mark Twain

It’s the mistake liberals make when dealing with creeps like Trump and Farage.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Nicolas Altstaedt plays the Bach Cello suites in the Philharmonie in Berlin

Link

This is long (an hour and three-quarters in total) but beautiful. It reminds me of Casals’s wonderful version recorded (I think) in a small deserted church in Spain many years ago.

Thanks to Seb Schmoller for the link.

The Simulmatics project

One of the great benefits of working in a university is that one has access to lots of stuff that’s normally behind journal paywalls. So when I saw that the historian Jill Lepore has a forthcoming book about an astonishing data-science operation that was up and running for the 1960 Presidential election, I went looking for academic papers by the people who ran the project. And lo and behold, here’s one by two of the key figures.

LATER Charles Arthur (whom God preserve) told me about a New Yorker (non-paywalled) piece by Jill Lepore in which she sketches out the story on which her book is based. It begins thus:

The Simulmatics Corporation opened for business on February 18, 1959, in an office rented by Edward L. Greenfield, the company’s thirty-one-year-old president, on an upper floor of a building at the corner of Madison Avenue and Fifty-second Street, five blocks south of I.B.M.’s glittering World Headquarters. Greenfield, an adman, political consultant, and all-around huckster, pulled people in like a “Looney Tunes” magnet. “Ed Greenfield,” he’d say, flashing a Dean Martin grin, slapping a back, offering a vodka-and-tonic, palming a business card. His new company’s offices were threadbare; his ambition could hardly have been grander. “Simulmatics,” a mashup of “simulation” and “automatic,” had much the same mystique as another nineteen-fifties neologism: “artificial intelligence.” Decades before Facebook and Google and Cambridge Analytica and every app on your phone, Simulmatics’ founders thought of it all: they had the idea that, if they could collect enough data about enough people and write enough good code, everything, one day, might be predicted—every human mind simulated and then directed by targeted messages as unerring as missiles. For its first mission, Simulmatics aimed to win the White House back for the Democratic Party.

In 1960, John F. Kennedy defeated Richard M. Nixon in a campaign that carries an air of destiny, mainly because of an iconic account by the reporter Theodore H. White. In “The Making of the President 1960,” White created the myth of Kennedy as an inevitable President—King Arthur, pulling Excalibur from the stone. But Kennedy’s bid for the nomination was a long shot, his victory in the general election was one of the closest in American history, and his campaign deployed an election simulator. However commonplace now, this was new then, and fiercely controversial. White, while never naming Simulmatics, took the trouble to disavow its influence on the very first page of his book. “It is the nature of politics that men must always act on the basis of uncertain fact,” he wrote. “Were it otherwise, then . . . politics would be an exact science in which our purposes and destiny could be left to great impersonal computers.” White was close to the Kennedy campaign, and the Kennedy campaign had decided to deny, publicly, that it had used Simulmatics…

Interesting piece of history that. The only book I read about Kennedy’s victory was Theodore White’s. So I’ve been labouring under a misapprehension for six decades!

WashPo’s ‘Date Lab’

It’s strange what newspapers get up to sometimes. The Washington Post, for example, has something called a Date Lab.

Here’s how it works: We search our database of thousands of Washington, D.C.-area singles until we find a pair with romance potential. Then we send them out on a blind date on our dime and report the results in the pages of the Washington Post Magazine and online.

Our requirements: To participate you must be over the age of 21, single and living in the greater D.C. area. You must agree to have your name, age and picture published and to participate in a telephone interview.

Apply now!

Here’s an excerpt from one of the ‘experiments’:

Meeting through a computer screen did not curb their physical chemistry. Sam immediately noticed Elli’s olive complexion. He added: “She’s beautiful.” Elli, who Sam described as “extroverted,” was not shy about stating her height preferences. “I was like, don’t worry, I’m 5-foot-11,” he said. “And no one would lie about being 5-foot-11, so you can believe me.”

Sam says his ideal partner would share 80 percent of his political views (100 percent “would be boring,” he says), and over the nearly three-hour conversation, they discovered where their 20 percent gap in politics lay: former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg. When Elli asked him who his preferred candidate was during the 2020 Democratic primaries, she said, “Please don’t say Pete.” (He said Pete.) Sam, on the other hand, says that Elli thought Buttigieg “was a Republican.” Ultimately, it was a difference that both of them could stomach.

There were no awkward lulls in conversation, and Sam did not consult his tab of questions even once…

Dark matter, second waves and epidemiological modelling

Since we can’t know the future, we have to make educated guesses about it. Statistical modelling is one way of doing that. This interesting (but not yet peer-reviewed) research paper uses a modelling approach to try to assess whether fears of a catastrophic Autumnal second wave of Covid-19 are too pessimistic.

Its conclusion is: they are. Or, as the researchers put it:

A dynamic causal model that incorporates heterogeneity of exposure, susceptibility and transmission suggests that the next wave of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic will be much smaller than conventional models predict, with less economic and health disruption. This heterogeneity means that seroprevalence underestimates effective herd immunity and, crucially, the potential of public health programmes.

I hope they’re right.

Om Malik on emerging from lockdown

Interesting postfrom a thoughtful tech commentator and photographer.

As I become more open to the world, I notice that the words others use to describe it have become more calculated. Every word online, it seems, is uttered for the benefit of the platforms. Through the feed, which is how we experience the “now,” words are designed to provoke outrage. Images are almost perfect, each one laser-printed to perfect saturation, built to get likes and followers. Like a polluted stream, it flows past us.

Faster and faster it goes, when slower is what I want everything to be — especially my photography. I have lost all interest in perfection. The representation of reality is meaningless. From politics to stock markets to fashion, we find ourselves trapped in a reality that is nothing more than synthetically generated memes in obeisance to the hyper-capitalism.

For me, the camera has become a way to try and escape this world defined by unreal reality. When I find something that I see in synchronicity with my inner self, I want to use it to paint that moment. I want to get lost in what I can only imagine. My journey is taking me deeper and deeper into these imagined landscapes.

This is a constant quest. As I looked out in the Pacific Ocean beyond Bolinas, the feeding frenzy unfolding in front of my eyes, I imagined it as a pastoral activity in the distance.

The ocean had a green-blue color, not the ominous dark blue that one encounters during the winter. The sky was gray, but somewhere beyond, you could feel the sun slowly slithering into the ocean.

His photographs are always distinctive, though never vivid.

It’s not just Americans who are paying the price of Trump’s thuggery

Great essay by Andrew Sullivan — now back on his own blog. This is how it begins…

The Uighur women in exile in Istanbul are the fortunate ones. They managed to escape the control of the Chinese Communist regime, thanks to relatives who found ways to get them out of the country. But one woman refugee also has a confession: “She speaks of participating in at least 500 to 600 operations on Uighur women including forced contraception, forced abortion, forced sterilisation and forced removal of wombs. She told me that on at least one occasion a baby was still moving when it was discarded into the rubbish.” She believed, she says, that this was just part of the Chinese government’s overall birth control policy. Now she knows that was a lie. While birthrates have fallen by 4 percent over the whole country, in Uighur areas, they have declined by 60 percent. The only word for this is genocide — something we have now known for some time.

Meanwhile, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has denied that he had anything to do with the sudden sickness of Alexander Navalny, the most prominent Russian opposition leader. A Russian hospital where Navalny was initially treated claimed there was no evidence of poisoning. But as soon as he was transferred to Berlin for medical attention, incontrovertible evidence emerged that Navalny had been poisoned by the now-familiar nerve agent, Novichok, a substance manufactured by the Russian government. It is the same poison used against a former Russian spy in exile in Salisbury, England, a little over two years ago.

China’s dictator, president-for-life Xi Jinping, has made some efforts to hide his new complex of concentration camps, but he does not appear to be worried. Vladimir Putin, despite the pro forma denials, is also not particularly concerned that he be discovered as a state assassin. In fact, the blatant use of a nerve agent long tied to the Kremlin is a sign that he wants these attempted murders to be attributed to him.

And both dictators know very well that in president Trump, they have an American leader who is actually impressed — rather than repelled — by this kind of state thuggery…

Worth reading in full.

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Quote of the Day

“All men are cremated equal”.

• Spike Milligan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

What happens when you put a piano in a public place

Link

Made my day! Hope it makes yours.

Let’s not forget, Bill Gates hasn’t always been the good guy…

This morning’s Observer column:

Twenty five years ago last Monday, Microsoft released Windows 95, its first operating system based on the Wimp (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) interface that had been developed at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s and, er, borrowed by Steve Jobs for the Apple Macintosh that he launched in 1984.

Few geeks who were around and sentient at the time will forget the hoop-la that surrounded the launch of the Microsoft system. It included a commercial that had the Rolling Stones’ Start Me Up as a soundtrack. The symbolism of this was that in order to get Win95 rolling you had to press the “Start” button. (Satirists quickly noted that in order to turn the operating system off you also had to press the Start button, but the joke was clearly lost on Microsoft’s designers.) It was variously reported that the company had paid the Stones between $8m and $14m for the right to use the song, but Microsoft said that this was just a rumour spread by the band to increase their market value, and that the company actually paid a fraction of that amount.

The geek community, which was – then as now – sceptical of the Microsoft juggernaut, viewed the hoop-la with a certain ironic detachment. Some observed that it had taken the company 11 years to catch up with Apple, or 22 years to catch up with PARC. But the most interesting aspect of the launch was the evidence it provided that even in 1995 Microsoft had not yet fully twigged the significance of the internet…

Read on

Some readers have pointed out that Microsoft had a number of earlier attempts at the WIMP user interface, which is true. But having used them, I can testify that none of them was what you might call a finished product. Win95 was the first attempt to do WIMP properly. Which is why Microsoft made such a fuss about it.

The GOP’s secret election platform

Perceptive Atlantic article by David Frum.

Republicans have decided not to publish a party platform for 2020.

This omission has led some to conclude that the GOP lacks ideas, that it stands for nothing, that it has shriveled to little more than a Trump cult.

This conclusion is wrong. The Republican Party of 2020 has lots of ideas. I’m about to list 13 ideas that command almost universal assent within the Trump administration, within the Republican caucuses of the U.S. House and Senate, among governors and state legislators, on Fox News, and among rank-and-file Republicans.

In summary they are:

1. The most important mechanism of economic policy—not the only tool, but the most important—is adjusting the burden of taxation on society’s richest citizens.
2. The coronavirus is a much-overhyped problem. It’s not that dangerous and will soon burn itself out.
3. Climate change is a much-overhyped problem. It’s probably not happening. If it is happening, it’s not worth worrying about.
4. China has become an economic and geopolitical adversary of the United States. Military spending should be invested with an eye to defeating China on the seas, in space, and in the cyberrealm.
5. The trade and alliance structures built after World War II are outdated.
6. Health care is a purchase like any other. Individuals should make their own best deals in the insurance market with minimal government supervision.
7. Voting is a privilege. States should have wide latitude to regulate that privilege in such a way as to minimize voting fraud, which is rife among Black Americans and new immigrant communities.
8. Anti-Black racism has ceased to be an important problem in American life. At this point, the people most likely to be targets of adverse discrimination are whites, Christians, and Asian university applicants.
9. The courts should move gradually and carefully toward eliminating the mistake made in 1965, when women’s sexual privacy was elevated into a constitutional right.
10. The post-Watergate ethics reforms overreached. We should welcome the trend toward unrestricted and secret campaign donations.
11. Trump’s border wall is the right policy to slow illegal immigration.
12. The country is gripped by a surge of crime and lawlessness as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement and its criticism of police.
13. Civility and respect are cherished ideals. But in the face of the overwhelming and unfair onslaught against President Donald Trump by the media and the “deep state,” his occasional excesses on Twitter and at his rallies should be understood as pardonable reactions to much more severe misconduct by others.

Storytelling with a camera

My son Brian (the other photographer in the family) has a new website.

Living with Covid-19

The head of France’s equivalent of the UK’s SAGE put it nicely when advising the organisers of the Tour de France: Covid is like a chronic illness: it’s going to last so you just have to learn to live with it.

Succinct articulation of the reality that so many people haven’t yet grasped. This thing isn’t going to go away.

How words morph

Edward Luce has an interesting review essay in the weekend edition of the Financial Times (which may be behind the paywall: apologies if so) in which he discusses the way political terms change their meanings over time. The three examples he picks are ‘populism’, ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ from Robert Frank’s new book, People without Power: the war on populism and the fight for democracy.

Frank claims, says Luce,

that the word “populism” has been hijacked. The term, an American original, now stands for what used to be meant by “Jacksonian” — resentful of those above you (the bankers and intellectuals) and cruel towards those below (the slaves and native Americans). In fact, Frank reminds us, the origins of US populism were very different. The prairie populists of the 1890s were in favour of racial integration, women’s emancipation and opposed to the robber baron capitalists. They gave birth not only to the term “populist” but also to the People’s Party, which briefly threatened to re-align US politics. Its legacy carried into the progressive era that helped tame American capitalism, enshrine fiat money, create income taxes and launch trust busting… It was quintessentially American in its yen for social equality and economic fairness. “Equal rights to all, special privileges to none”, was its founding creed.

And as far as ‘liberal’ is concerned…

The term used to mean 19th century bourgeois nationalists who believed in free trade. In America it evolved to mean people who believe both in social freedom and government intervention in the economy.

And what about ‘conservative’?

Conservative originally derived from “conserve” that things should be kept the same. Now, in America at least, it means whatever Donald Trump wants it to mean, which can take even his closest acolytes by surprise.

The Johnson method of government: total power with zero responsibility

Great Observer column by Andrew Rawnsley.

Sample:

Within Mr Johnson’s inner circle, it is a private boast that they are “tearing up the rule book” of government. One of the rules that they have been shredding most aggressively is the concept of ministerial responsibility. Under previous governments of many different complexions, this idea has been central to how democratic politics is supposed to work. When things go wrong, the minister is accountable to parliament and must answer to the public for his department’s failings. When things go badly wrong, the minister resigns. Ministerial responsibility is at the core of the compact between government, parliament and public. Bronwen Maddox, the director of the Institute for Government, has it right when she says: “Unless there are consequences for ministers of the decisions that are their responsibility, the UK’s principles of democratic accountability will become meaningless.”

This government has inverted the doctrine to the point where ministers assign responsibility for misjudgments and failures to anyone but themselves. When searching for somewhere else to throw the blame, their first choice is civil servants, who make convenient targets because they are not supposed to answer back. So out goes Sally Collier, chief executive of Ofqual, the regulator, over the grading fiasco. Following her overboard goes Jonathan Slater, the permanent secretary at the Department for Education, who was sacked in a fashion brutal even by the standards of the current regime. Mr Williamson, meantime, stumbles on towards his next appointment with calamity in an apparent determination to make Chris Grayling feel a bit better about his time in government.

In an even darker part of the forest, there is a manifest effort to manipulate inquiries into the handling of the coronavirus crisis by shifting culpability from the prime minister and his lieutenants.

The Johnson/Cummings playbook is a variant of the Trump one. And people used to think that that kind of thing couldn’t happen here.

One of the things we didn’t properly appreciate until 2016 is how liberal democracy depends as much on norms and conventions as it does on the rule of law. When elected politicians like Trump and Johnson start to flout conventions and ignore norms, then things go to pieces very quickly. And the flouting creates precedents for their successors, whoever they turn out to be.

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Quote of the Day

”Irrationally-held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.”

• TH Huxley

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mumford & Sons plus friends: Amazing Grace — sung like you’ve never heard it sung before. (9’49”)

Link

At Bonnaroo, Tennessee in 2011.

How not to campaign against Trump

Shrewd column by Jack Shafer:

As Trump prepares to run the same campaign as he did in 2016, the Democrats shouldn’t feel obliged to return the favor. Clinton, like some of the Republicans who ran against Trump then, spent a great deal of her energy accentuating Trump’s many negatives—his chauvinism, his bigotry, his caustic personality, his political shallowness, his flip-floppery, his cruelty, and his endless lies, just to name a few. Clinton extended her attack on Trump into an attack on his supporters, depositing half of them in a “basket of deplorables.”

Trump’s flaws seemed like easy targets, but when the votes were counted, it turned out they didn’t matter much. Few of the punches at Trump’s negatives landed with the people whom Clinton needed to reach, and those that did were canceled out by what his supporters consider his positives—his professed love of America, his Reaganesque optimism about the future, his projection of strength, opposition to illegal immigration, his pro-gun policies, his plain-spoken, “candid” responses to the issues, his anti-government and anti-Washington rhetoric, sticking it to insiders like Jeb Bush and Clinton, and his promise to return the nation to the good old days. So great are Trump’s positives that they have provided him qualified immunity—in the eyes of his supporters, at least—from the critiques of the fact-checkers.

As I wrote in 2016, shouting about Trump’s negatives did little to persuade his supporters to abandon him, because they had already discounted—practically embraced—his warts.

That sounds to me like a shrewd analysis.

What Does Boredom Do to Us—and for Us?

This is weird. I met a guy recently who was arguing that one of the explanations for Brexit was boredom. I wondered privately what he’d been smoking. And then I open the New Yorker and there’s a long essay on the subject. Humans have been getting bored for centuries, if not millennia, it says. And now there’s a whole field to study the sensation, at a time when it may be more rampant than ever.

Here’s how it begins:

Quick inventory: Among the many things you might be feeling more of these days, is boredom one of them? It might seem like something to disavow, automatically, when the country is roiling. The American plot thickens by the hour. We need to be paying attention. But boredom, like many an inconvenient human sensation, can steal over a person at unseemly moments. And, in some ways, the psychic limbo of the pandemic has been a breeding ground for it—or at least for a restless, buzzing frustration that can feel a lot like it.

Fundamentally, boredom is, as Tolstoy defined it, “a desire for desires.” The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, describing the feeling that sometimes drops over children like a scratchy blanket, elaborated on this notion: boredom is “that state of suspended animation in which things are started and nothing begins, the mood of diffuse restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire.” In a new book, “Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom,” James Danckert, a neuroscientist, and John D. Eastwood, a psychologist, nicely describe it as a cognitive state that has something in common with tip-of-the-tongue syndrome—a sensation that something is missing, though we can’t quite say what.

I don’t think I’ve ever been bored, so I’m afraid I don’t get it.

Chinese students and Uber

In answer to my post a few days ago asking “What is it about Uber and Chinese students?” Paul Lefrere writes:

“The answer is in the annotated map that comes with the receipt for an Uber trip. Uber tracks and records every nuance of each journey you take, in a life-logging way that is not compatible with privacy as we experience it in the West. But, in both PRC and USA, Chinese students and Chinese professors tell me that they accept Uber’s tracking and documenting as “a feature, not a flaw”.

Many thanks, Paul.

Zuckerberg blames contractors for failing to remove Kenosha militia’s ‘call to arms’

Guardian report.

Mark Zuckerberg blamed an “operational mistake” by contractors for Facebook’s failure to remove the “call to arms” of a Kenosha, Wisconsin, militia prior to the shooting Tuesday night that left two people dead and another injured.

The Kenosha Guard militia had established a Facebook page in June 2020 and this week used a Facebook event page to invite “any patriots willing to take up arms and defend out sic City tonight from the evil thugs”, referencing those protesting the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Facebook has admitted that both the page and the event should have been banned under the company’s new policy addressing groups linked to violence, such as militias. The company nevertheless failed to remove the page or event despite multiple users who reported the content to Facebook, the Verge reported.

“It was largely an operational mistake,” Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, said in remarks during a weekly meeting with staff. Facebook has a specially trained team dedicated to enforcing its ban on “dangerous organizations”, Zuckerberg said. “The contractors and the reviewers who the initial complaints were were funneled to … basically didn’t pick this up.” Once reports were sent to the specialized team – after the fatal shooting – both the page and the event were removed.

Why do we tolerate this company?

The Conscience of Silicon Valley

An interview with Jaron Lanier.

Clip:

He returned to thinking about my attempt at a summary of his life’s work. He said he thought I wasn’t wrong but it was important that people not get the impression that he was trying to tell them how to live. “I love the foundational papers of the United States, where they’ll talk about, you know, the pursuit of happiness,” he said. “Like, you don’t define what happiness is, and you don’t define it as something that will be achieved. It’s the pursuit. You leave space for future people to find it themselves. And so, I think the number one priority is to not create perverse incentives that ruin quests for meaning or for happiness or for decency or betterment.”

Perverse incentives are what Lanier has spent his life railing against—the way that tech is co-opted and digital spaces colonized for the profit of people (or, perhaps eventually, robots) who do not care about your happiness.

“So,” he said, sighing. “My project is in a way more modest than you’re making it out to be. It’s more…it’s more to not fuck the future over, you know?”

Lanier is a truly good person in an almost unworldly sense. I once went to interview him at his hotel in London when he was on a book tour. He had done three interviews with various journalists that morning before it was my turn. We had an intense conversation for about twenty minutes about issues raised in the book that had intrigued or puzzled me. Then he suddenly went quiet. “What’s up?” I asked him, anxiously. Had I said something to annoy or hurt him? “I’m just thinking”, he said, “that you’re the only person I’ve talked to who has actually read my book”.

I had my Leica with me and asked him at the end if I could take a photo (above). Years later I had an email from him saying that he urgently needed a pic for some gig he was doing and could he use it. Which of course he could.

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Quote of the Day

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

• Aldous Huxley, 1927.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Haydn – Trumpet Concerto in E-flat major (9’45”)

Link

Stamps to mark 25th anniversary of Father Ted sitcom

I could never understand why so many people — including my kids and their mother and many members of my extended family — loved the Father Ted sitcom. Given that they are all Irish I could hadly acuse them of enjoying racist trash. So I just had to grin and bear it.

And now, look what’s happened!

A quarter of a century after it first aired, Father Ted, one of television’s most loved sitcoms, has officially stamped itself on popular culture.

Ireland’s post service, An Post, issued a set of stamps on Thursday to celebrate its characters and one-liners and to mark the show’s 25th anniversary.

Phrases forever associated with Craggy Island, the fictional home of three wayward priests and their housekeeper, now adorn four stamps.

Guardian story.

People Drawn to Conspiracy Theories Share a Cluster of Psychological Features

Useful Scientific American article on the experience of the cognitive Stephan Lewandowsky when he did research on why people believe conspiracy theories.

About six years ago the cognitive scientist had thrown himself into a study of why some people refuse to accept the overwhelming evidence that the planet is warming and humans are responsible. As he delved into this climate change denialism, Lewandowsky, then at the University of Western Australia, discovered that many of the naysayers also believed in outlandish plots, such as the idea that the Apollo moon landing was a hoax created by the American government. “A lot of the discourse these people were engaging in on the Internet was totally conspiratorial,” he recalls.

Lewandowsky’s findings, published in 2013 in Psychological Science, brought these conspiracy theorists out of the woodwork. Offended by his claims, they criticized his integrity online and demanded that he be fired. (He was not, although he has since moved to the University of Bristol in England.) But as Lewandowsky waded through one irate post after another, he discovered that his critics—in response to his assertions about their conspiratorial tendencies—were actually spreading new conspiracy theories about him. These people accused him and his colleagues of faking survey responses and of conducting the research without ethical approval. When his personal Web site crashed, one blogger accused him of intentionally blocking critics from seeing it. None of it was true.

The irony was amusing at first, but the ranting even included a death threat, and calls and e-mails to his university became so vicious that the administrative staff who fielded them asked their managers for help. That was when Lewandowsky changed his assessment. “I quickly realized that there was nothing funny about these guys at all,” he says.

Of course all lives matter, but that’s not the point

Memorable post by Dave Winer:

If when someone says Black Lives Matter you quickly respond with All Lives Matter then I have a few things I want to say to you.

At least pause for a moment before replying and ask yourself why this person is saying Black Lives Matter. Of course they know and agree that all lives matter. But that isn’t what they’re saying. They’re saying that Black Lives Matter not because they’re more important than white lives or cop lives, which seems to be how you’re interpreting it, but because a lot of black people are being killed and the justice system does not seem to care.

I think we all know that if Trayvon Martin, for example, had been a white teen, and George Zimmerman had been a black adult man, the outcome would have been different. But because he was black, and black lives don’t matter, Martin is dead and Zimmerman is free.

There have been a seemingly endless series of graphic stories, many of them on video, of white police killing black people, and getting off. I suspect this has been going on all along, but now with the wide use of smartphones, we’re actually seeing it, visually, as we couldn’t have seen it before. Now it’s not their word against a cop’s. The video provides testimony that is impossible to refute.

If you were black, and you saw this happening, you might be inspired to do more than say something like Black Lives Matter. Your rage and fear might overwhelm you. So the first thing I would say to a black person who said Black Lives Matter is thank you for containing the rage you must feel, that I would feel if I were in your shoes, that I feel in a small way on your behalf, at the cruelty and callousness of our system and culture. Then I’d ask if there was anything I could do to help.

The User Always Loses: How did the Internet get so bad?

Lisa Borst’s perceptive review in The Nation of Joanne McNeil’s new book, Lurking: How a Person Became a User, “a conversational and idiosyncratic account of the past 30 years of online life that reminds us that the Internet didn’t have to become what it is today”.

Long read of the Day.

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Made my day this morning!

Quote of the Day

“Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true”.

• Samuel Johnson

Musical alternative to this morning’s radio news

Glen Campbell playing the William Tell Overture

Link

And if this doesn’t leave you gibbering, then I don’t know what will.

How a brand of chalk achieved cult status among mathematicians

Improbable but lovely story — with a happy ending… Who knew that mathematicians take chalk so seriously?

Link

Tony Connelly on Phil Hogan’s resignation from the European Commission

Connelly is Ireland’s most astute political commentator. This morning he was on song about the resignation of Ireland’s European Commissioner.

Phil Hogan’s resignation is a very dramatic development, marking a decisive moment in one of the most fractious periods in Irish politics.

It is almost unprecedented for a European Commissioner to resign. He has held one of the most important European portfolios at a time when international trade has been at the forefront of historic upheavals in global politics, from Brexit to trade wars with the United States and China, and even how the Covid-19 pandemic could change the way trade operates.

But it was that very pandemic which caused his downfall. His defensive, then fragmented response to the Clifden golf dinner raised the hackles of many Irish people angered at what were seen as double standards, and dismayed the coalition government, which feared that the critical message on curtailing infections was being drowned out by the crescendo of public anger over the controversy.

Phil Hogan did apologise, at times profusely, first in a statement, and then during an RTÉ News interview. But his position was damaged further by his defence that a negative Covid-19 test absolved him of the 14-day period of restricted movements. Official statements suggested otherwise.

Despite a passionate appeal for forgiveness and to be able continue his work as trade commissioner, the Government still could not express full confidence in him, and this put Dublin on a potential collision course with the European Commission.

That collision has been averted. Phil Hogan has chosen to resign himself.

(Readers puzzled by the “golf dinner” business may find this report helpful.)

The stock market is crazily out of sync with the real world.

From Quartz this morning…

Should we be worried about a stock bubble? It seems odd to discuss irrational exuberance when the economy is anything but exuberant, but these are unlikely times. To help answer this question, consider Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles, a new book by William Quinn and John Turner. Their research suggests there are three necessary ingredients for a financial firestorm: speculation, marketability (how easy it is to buy an asset—think innovation in stock trading apps, or the brainiacs who brought us mortgage-backed securities), and credit.

Quinn and Turner find that asset booms are happening more frequently, and that government policy—meant to make housing more affordable, or shed unsustainable debts, for example—is often the spark that lights the financial fire. If ultra-low interest rates and the boom in brokerage apps like Robinhood are any indications, a bubble in equities could be inflating as we speak.

Is there a pattern here? For example, social media make it easy for anyone to say virtually anything online — and have it spread like wildfire. The result: a polluted public sphere which distorts perceptions of political and social reality. Apps like Robinhood make it possible for anyone to buy and sell shares instantly. The result: an asset bubble which is totally removed from economic reality.

Citizen Lab report on Chinese censorship of Covid news

The Citizen Lab of the University of Toronto carried out daily tests on WeChat censorship practices, collecting 2,174 censored keywords between January to May 2020. The data provide a window into censorship practices related to COVID 19 on WeChat, the preeminent chat application in China. The country’s censorship regime is highly distributed, organised through a process of “intermediary liability” in which the platforms themselves largely decide what content to censor and how to do so.

OnWeChat, censored keywords and images are removed from chats without any notice to the sender or receiver — making censorship decisions largely opaque. The Citizen Lab’s daily experiments involved automatically sending thousands of news articles between WeChat accounts controlled by the Lab and then observing which of those triggered censorship, thereby allowing researchers to observe exactly what content is being censored on a daily basis. After finding a news article that was censored, they then identified which combination of keywords may have triggered its censorship.

Findings

The first period (December 31, 2019 to March 2020) covered the emergence and spread of COVID-19 in China. Censored keywords focussed on:

• early warning of the virus,
• interactions between China and the WHO)
• general health information
• criticism of China’s response to COVID-19.

The second period (beginning in March 2020) covers the phase in which the virus becomes a pandemic and goes global. During this phase, the focus of censored content went beyond issues in China proper to cover:

• international responses to COVID-19
• international criticism of the Chinese government.

The third and final phase focused on the period in which the United States became the global epicentre of the pandemic. Censored content in this period included:

• conspiracy theories,
• U.S. criticism of China’s political system,
• critical and neutral references to China-US relations, and
• U.S. domestic politics.

Report

Great research. Reminds me of the work that Gary King and his colleagues at Harvard have done on examining how the Chinese censorship system works in practice.

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From small beginnings…

… come mighty oaks. Found this on the pavement near our house yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”Actually, I am a golfer. That is my real occupation. I never was an actor; ask anybody, particularly the critics.”

• Victor Mature

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio new

Joan Baez & Paul Simon – The Boxer – Live 2016 NYC at 75th – Birthday Celebration

Link

A TikTok Ban Is Overdue

Tim Wu in the NYT with what is, for him, an unfamiliar argument: basically just because Trump is an idiot, that doesn’t mean that everything he does is wrong.

The United States government does not usually block or censor lawful websites, foreign or domestic, because it subscribes to the idea that the internet was designed to be open and connect everyone on earth. On its face, then, President Trump’s recent treatment of the Chinese apps TikTok and WeChat, which he threatened to ban from the United States unless they could find American buyers, looks close-minded and belligerent.

There is more to this situation, though, than meets the eye. Were almost any country other than China involved, Mr. Trump’s demands would be indefensible. But the threatened bans on TikTok and WeChat, whatever their motivations, can also be seen as an overdue response, a tit for tat, in a long battle for the soul of the internet.

In China, the foreign equivalents of TikTok and WeChat — video and messaging apps such as YouTube and WhatsApp — have been banned for years. The country’s extensive blocking, censorship and surveillance violate just about every principle of internet openness and decency. China keeps a closed and censorial internet economy at home while its products enjoy full access to open markets abroad.

The asymmetry is unfair and ought no longer be tolerated. The privilege of full internet access — the open internet — should be extended only to companies from countries that respect that openness themselves.

China can’t have it both ways, and it’s about time we enforced that rather than appeasing Xi Jinping & Co.

Kamala Harris has a long record of being pally with Big Tech

Yeah, well I wondered about that. Today’s NYT article is not exactly reassuring.

For Ms. Harris, a Bay Area politician, connections to tech have been essential and perhaps inescapable. In past campaigns — her two elections to be attorney general, her successful run for the Senate and her failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination — she relied on Silicon Valley’s tech elite for donations. And her network of family, friends and former political aides has fanned throughout the tech world.

Those close industry ties have coincided with a largely hands-off approach to companies that have come under increasing scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers around the world. As California’s attorney general, critics say, Ms. Harris did little to curb the power of tech giants as they gobbled up rivals and muscled into new industries. As a senator, consumer advocacy groups said, she has often moved in lockstep with tech interests.

Now that she is the running mate of Joseph R. Biden Jr., tech industry critics worry that a Biden administration with Ms. Harris would mean a return to the cozy relationship that Silicon Valley enjoyed with the White House under President Barack Obama.

Although vice presidents rarely set policy, as a former state attorney general Ms. Harris is expected to have a say in Mr. Biden’s political appointments at the Justice Department, including officials who oversee antitrust enforcement. She could also have a significant influence on tech policy in a Biden administration, since Mr. Biden has largely focused on other issues.

Way back in January, Biden was very forthright on these matters in an extended interview with the NYT’s editorial team. Here’s the relevant passage:

Charlie Warzel: Sure. Mr. Vice President, in October, your campaign sent a letter to Facebook regarding an ad that falsely claimed that you blackmailed Ukrainian officials to not investigate your son. I’m curious, did that experience, dealing with Facebook and their power, did that change the way that you see the power of tech platforms right now?

Biden: No, I’ve never been a fan of Facebook, as you probably know. I’ve never been a big Zuckerberg fan. I think he’s a real problem. I think ——

CW: Can you elaborate?

No, I can. He knows better. And you know, from my perspective, I’ve been in the view that not only should we be worrying about the concentration of power, we should be worried about the lack of privacy and them being exempt, which you’re not exempt. The Times can’t write something you know to be false and be exempt from being sued. But he can. The idea that it’s a tech company is that Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one. For Zuckerberg and other platforms.

(Footnote: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act says that online platforms aren’t held liable for things their users post on them, with some exceptions.)

CW: That’s a pretty foundational laws of the modern internet.

That’s right. Exactly right. And it should be revoked. It should be revoked because it is not merely an internet company. It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false, and we should be setting standards not unlike the Europeans are doing relative to privacy. You guys still have editors. I’m sitting with them. Not a joke. There is no editorial impact at all on Facebook. None. None whatsoever. It’s irresponsible. It’s totally irresponsible.

CW: If there’s proven harm that Facebook has done, should someone like Mark Zuckerberg be submitted to criminal penalties, perhaps?

He should be submitted to civil liability and his company to civil liability, just like you would be here at The New York Times. Whether he engaged in something and amounted to collusion that in fact caused harm that would in fact be equal to a criminal offense, that’s a different issue.

So, we’ll see…

Summer books #10

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford, Faber & Faber, 2010.

This is one of the most imaginative books I’ve ever read. It’s a part-factual, part-fictional account of a moment in the history of the Soviet Union when, briefly, it looked as though the fairy-tale that a centrally-planned economy could produce an abundance of good things might actually be true. It was a fairy tale, of course, and Francis Spufford has come up with a literary form that matches it.

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Quote of the Day

” In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.”

• H.L. Mencken

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Parting Glass – Ceiliuradh at the Royal Albert Hall

Link

In April 2014, the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, paid the first State Visit of an Irish Head of State to the UK. On the concluding night of the visit, the President attended a remarkable celebration — called a Ceiliuradh in Irish — in the Albert Hall. The concert was produced by my friend Philip King, and ended with all of the artists who had participated singing The Parting Glass, a traditional way of bringing an evening to a close.

UK has another go at a contact-tracing app

According to The Register…

Britain’s NHS has released its second go at a contact-tracing app to help limit the spread of COVID-19 coronavirus infections, thanks in part to some help from the neighbors.

Limited trials of the smartphone app have begun on the Isle of Wight and in the London Borough of Newham, roughly two months after the first version of the software flamed out due to its failure to reliably keep track of the people you’ve been near, which is somewhat of an oversight for a program that’s supposed to warn you if you’ve been close to someone who tests positive.

In order to prevent a recurrence of the first app fiasco, it is understood that the UK government this time tapped up the Apple-Google decentralized API to reliably and efficiently perform the wireless contact tracing, which works on Android and iOS.

The report claims that the developers had help from Germany and Ireland. This won’t stop Boris Johnson claiming that it’s “world-leading”, though.

Summer reading #3

Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers by Cheryl Misak, OUP, 2020.

Frank Ramsey was a brilliant philosopher, mathematician and economist who died in 1930 at the age of 26 having made pathbreaking contributions to all three disciplines. He died from an illness contracted when he went swimming in the river Cam. Despite his youth, his intellectual contributions have been lasting and very influential. Paul Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics, said that “Frank Ramsey was a genius by all tests for genius”. Up to now there’s never been a biography for the general reader, which is hardly surprising given that Ramsey’s work was pretty abstruse. Despite that, though, Cheryl Misak has produced an amazingly readable and enjoyable biography without compromising on thoroughness. And it leaves one with an acute understanding of why Ramsey’s contemporaries were so devastated by his tragic and untimely death.

The joys of blogging

I’ve been blogging for a long time, and from the outset my working assumption was that it would be prudent to assume that on some of the topics I chose to cover there would be readers who knew more than me. And, broadly speaking, that’s been borne out over the years.

Recently, I became so fed up with the morning radio news programmes — particularly by the way the Johnson government has decided to hobble serious news outlets by refusing to let government ministers appear — that I decided it would be better for my sanity just to listen to music at breakfast and read the news in papers and on the Web. Hence the ‘Musical alternative’ at the top of each day’s blog.

Since then I’ve had a stream of great emails from readers with comments on music I’ve chosen and suggestions for other choices. Hugh Taylor, for example, wrote after the ‘James Joyce Playlist’ selection to suggest Beniamino Gigli singing in the bel canto style that Joyce so admired.

Ian Clark wrote about the track in which Paul Simon sang ‘American Tune’ and revealed something that I would never have known, namely that the tune was originally by Bach — which set me off on a hunt. My wife is a pianist and an organist and immediately recognised it as an Anglican hymn, “O sacred head’.

Then yesterday I had Leo Kottke playing another Bach tune, ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s desiring’ which I remembered hearing Kottke play at the Cambridge Folk Festival way back sometime in the 1970s. I couldn’t for the life of me remember which year, though. And then what should turn up in my email from Kevin Cryan this morning with an amazing link giving the date: July 28, 1979.

The great thing about blogging is the way it encourages humility in the blogger!

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